Just because Trump didn’t, in the words of one commentator, “bite the head off a bat” doesn’t mean the State of the Donald speech was the greatest thing since the Gettysburg Address. Both stylistically and substantively, it was a lousy speech. If Obama had given it, everyone would be talking about how bad it was.
The phrase “soft bigotry of low expectations” was applied initially to the education of low-income and minority school children, but it applies here, too. We are entitled to better.